Asteroid in a Bag? Bag it, Says MIT Space Scientist

MIT planetary scientist Richard Binzel calls himself an “asteroid guy.” He’s been studying the rocky planetoids for decades now, so you might think he’d be thrilled with NASA’s plan to snag a very small asteroid in a very large bag and tow it into lunar orbit for astronauts to visit.

In fact, he’s anything but. At a talk last summer, Binzel called the Asteroid Return Mission (or ARM) “the emperor with no clothes, or at best with very thin cloth.” And now he’s written a commentary in the latest issue of Nature laying out his objections in greater detail, but also proposing an alternative. Instead of bringing one of the solar system’s uncounted asteroids to us, he says, we should send astronauts to visit them in a program that could ultimately lead to the goal people have been looking toward since the Space Age began: sending astronauts to Mars.